Return-to-sanity mandate

RTO vs remote is the wrong debate, I think it should be all about returning to sanity

The Lark notification was loud on my Mac, just when I was in the middle of a deep focused state. I just had scheduled a meeting a day before on 2pm to discuss a certain project, with the exact same set of people. I thought, “but we have a 2pm meeting on this, why call now?”

I hesitated to answer, it was my manager’s call. I rejected it, and messaged my manager afterwards. “Sorry, I am busy and need time.”

Then she replied, “Oh this is for project X, can you join?”

Project X was totally new to my radar at that point. It was for a different project, there was no heads up, and it was 11am in the morning. What my manager probably thought was a harmless 10-minute drop-in is, scientifically speaking, a cognitive wrecking ball. It actually takes about 23 minutes to fully return to a task after an unexpected interruption. By ambushing me, she didn’t just take ten minutes; she effectively torched my entire hour of cognitive momentum. I remember a dev friend telling me how a quick “where’s that file?” ping erased a complex mental map he had built for coding, setting him back an hour.

I don’t know if Lark is bad, or the lack of boundary is. I think it’s both. Lark, as a tool, has a mental model of a meeting as a group call, and it will broadcast anyone starting it like it’s the most important meeting in the world. Compare this to most other collaboration and meeting tools, like Google Meets, where it’s essentially a holding room where people join on their own time. But the fact that the lack of context-setting culture in this company aggravates the situation makes it unbearable.

In another company, there was a dedicated “focus zone” and “chat zone” where… I guess, they’re pretty self-explanatory. Focus zone is where you shut up and do the work. Chat zone is where you have free reign on how you use your speaking rights. But so many times, since it’s a free-seating zone for both, people tend to flock to the focus zone as it’s more quiet but ironically they conduct meetings on the desk with loud voices emanating through the entire universe. It perfectly mirrors that famous Harvard Business School study where researchers found that open-plan office spaces actually drop face-to-face interactions by 70%. Instead of collaborating, people just put on noise-canceling headphones to survive the chaos.

Understandably, meeting rooms are rare, and even if we provide plenty of them, some people just flock to it without booking or mass-book it for the next week for no reason. Workplace analytics actually show that up to 30% of booked meeting rooms are “ghosted”—booked but left empty. This artificial scarcity leaves people with no choice other than to have meetings on their desk. At my last agency, one guy literally camped out in our quiet “library” zone every single day to take his client calls because the acoustics were nice, defending himself by saying HR had mass-booked all the rooms for a month.

I then wonder what the purpose is of return-to-office mandates since people just 70% use their computer and maybe 20% loud-talk on their desks with coworkers in other offices or other floors. Maybe the remaining 10% is a lively “collaboration” about what’s for lunch. We’re living a bizarre commute-to-Zoom reality where nearly 70% of employees go into the office just to spend their day on virtual calls with people in entirely different cities, even different floors and different desks!

We all already know: Most digital work can be done through a screen, and talking is not always necessary. Especially for those on a maker’s schedule. Makers need deep, uninterrupted hours; managers operate in one-hour blocks of talking and context-switching. This is exactly why RTO mandates are always on the manager schedule. Data from the Future Forum proved exactly this, showing that a massive 75% of executives wanted to return to the office, compared to only 34% of the actual employees doing the making. They’re unscrupulously insecure about their power to oversee others and just want to breathe down their necks.

But I honestly think it goes beyond return-to-office mandates. I believe that even if you enforce RTO, if you have a good culture of respect and boundaries, it can actually be wonderful. Equally, working remotely doesn’t automatically mean it’s the best or safest mode of work. Combine remote work with a micromanaging boss, and you’ll still feel them breathing down your neck through frequent check-ins and, well, unexpected Lark calls.

I think the best mandate a company could issue is a return-to-sanity mandate—where everyone genuinely respects boundaries, schedules, and workloads. Even if the excuse is that we have to move “fast and break things,” I think maybe that culture is fundamentally broken, or maybe the industry is. I personally wouldn’t stay long in that kind of environment; if I couldn’t change it, I’d just move on. No company is worth fighting for your boundaries for years on end.

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